Fishing is an ancient human tradition -- one that satisfies vital food needs of hundreds of millions of people and is economically, socially and culturally important. Today, however, tradition has been transformed into a resource extraction industry spanning the globe. In its wake, fish populations are being dangerously depleted; nature's balance is being altered across vast areas of the world's oceanic ecosystems in ways that may be irreversible, and key species in the complex, diverse web of marine life are threatened.